UK Edition
Review
Roméo et Juliette, Grange Park Opera, review: an overly genteel staging of an operatic dud
Considerably prettified since its rather spartan inauguration last year, Wasfi Kani’s new opera house in the grounds of West Horsley Place, in Surrey – the current base for the organisation known as Grange Park Opera and previously based at The Grange in Hampshire – is now elegantly brick-clad, decorated with fancy illuminations and served by a splendidly appointed rotunda of lavatories replacing unsightly rows of creaking portacabins.
What we see on stage needs to measure up to all this luxury, however, and I found it slightly disconcerting that the most electrifying aspect of this so-so rendering of Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette was Kani’s introductory speech – a rhetorical tour de force that went some way to explain why she has almost single-handedly succeeded in raising over £10 million for this project alone.
True, Roméo et Juliette is a tough nut to crack. It has the advantage of Shakespeare’s familiar plot (albeit much simplified) and about 30 minutes of wonderful love music, notably Romeo’s invocation Ah! lève-toi soleil, and the exquisite duet Nuit d’hyménée. But the piece as a whole plods, the Nurse and Mercutio are under-characterised and the dramatic atmosphere is deadeningly one of genteel Victorian sentimentality rather than the hot, sexy danger of the Italian Renaissance.
Nothing about the performance set the heart racing. Stephen Barlow’s conducting of English National Opera’s orchestra (lent here for the summer) lavished affection on the romantic highlights but failed to galvanise the more turgid passages in the earlier scenes, and both the young singers playing the star-cross’d lovers took some time to warm up.
Olena Tokar, a Ukrainian soprano based in Leipzig, gave a nervously hard-edged account of Juliette’s opening showpiece, the insouciant waltzing Je veux vivre, but barring the odd shrill squawk, she gained in confidence as she fell for her Roméo and rose to deliver the potion monologue with dignity and conviction. Her French, like that of all this polyglot cast, remained indeterminate.
David Junghoon Kim, a Korean tenor graduated from Covent Garden’s apprentice programme, has a strong vocal technique that gives him the chops for Roméo’s more ardent outpourings as well as his melancholy pianissimo farewell to Juliette. Unfortunately, he’s not an animated actor and his prosaic appearance hardly suggests the romantic lover.
The remainder of the cast proved a mixed bag. There were some rather woofy contributions from the basses Clive Bayley and Mats Almgren as Capulet and Frère Laurent, and Gary Griffiths is miscast as Mercutio – a lighter, crisper touch is required for the Queen Mab episode. Much more satisfying were Anthony Flaum’s vivid, testy Tybalt and Anna Grevelius’s charming Stéphano.
Patrick Mason’s anodyne staging quits Shakespeare’s fair Verona for the grimmer Rome of the blackshirts. Gounod’s sugar-heavy score offers nothing to justify or indicate such an updating, but Francis O’Connor’s designs provide an austere and undistracting visual frame.
It wasn’t misery, but it wasn’t much fun either: the awful truth is that unless you can field front-ranking stars of the Netrebko and Grigolo class, this opera remains a bit of a dud.